Notes from David Fertig's talk

Did you miss David's talk? Bummer! It was great; here are some highlights:

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Morphological change!

Idea: There is no change without variation

Based on corpus data (Nuremberg corpus, approx. 0.5 million words, mostly autograph manuscripts), it historically tends to be women who are more likely to pattern with the modern Nuremberg dialect.

Autograph manuscripts are good! These tell us what people actually wrote, they haven't been modified by an editor or scribe.

David has evidence of change for high-frequency words. Neat!

Audience is tricky. Who do people write to? Very few examples of writing to different audiences.

Analogical change in the corpus doesn't lead to regularization.

We assume that speakers are always trying to conform to prevailing usage, and that any change is an error. But is it?

The case of Balthasar Paumgartner.

Currently: -s to -st using ANNIS corpus